THE GARDENING YEAR AT WOODHILL MANOR
In the final part of our seasonal series from this inspirational country garden, we celebrate the confectionery colours and sweet scents of spring
The final part of our glorious seasonal series celebrates spring in this classic country garden
When head gardener Kate Halls and her assistant Lisa Firth talk about spring at Woodhill Manor, they can barely contain their excitement. “Everything is so verdant and full of promise and there are tulips everywhere,” Kate says. “You see all that new growth coming through and you’re torn between stopping to look at it and falling over yourself to get the jobs done.” It is a seasonal highlight in this two-acre garden: the culmination of many months of hard work – from the planting up of thousands of bulbs in the autumn to the long hours of seed sowing in the greenhouse in winter. “By the beginning of May, the benches are rammed,” Kate says. “We have to keep moving seed trays and modules around to make space for more.”
There is a rigorous system in place to prevent them losing track of what they have sown. Every single tray of seedlings is listed on a whiteboard in the greenhouse and is given a different colour label according to which area of the garden its contents are destined for. So there’s pink for the cutting garden, blue for the coach house beds, red for the perennial borders and so on. “We grow many thousands of flowers from seed, so this is an idea we introduced a few years ago,” Lisa says. “It helps us keep an eye on what stock we have and we can readily find what we need.”
“Messing about with colour” is one of the things that Kate and Lisa, along with parttime assistants Sonia Dodridge and Victoria Menzies, relish. They pore over seed and plant catalogues and are forever tweaking their plans to arrive at the most pleasing combinations. Kate generously shares these plans online on Instagram and once these are in bloom, she will capture them in exquisite flat lays (arrangements of flowers photographed from
Cut flowers are always wanted for the house, so it’s helpful to have a mix of colours to hand
above). It was this documenting that gave her the idea to produce an annual record of the gardens for Woodhill’s owners.
In the courtyard outside the manor’s 19thcentury coach house is a garden dedicated to spring. The tulips here are what Kate describes as “a sweetie mix” – a stunning collection of cottage late varieties in confectionery colours (supplied as a ready-mix by jparkers.co.uk), to which they add their own picks, such as candy pink and white Tulipa ‘Ollioules’, tangerine ‘Dordogne’ and subtle ‘Violet Beauty’. They come up under a canopy of Japanese acers and white-stemmed birches, and around them is a beautiful collection of perennials – longlasting Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’, Tellima grandiflora, sanguisorba and sedums, and grasses such as Pennisetum ‘Dark Desire’ and
P. ‘Red Buttons’ and Panicum ‘Northwind’.
Cut flowers are always wanted for the house, so it is helpful to have a ready-made mixture of colours to hand. Old enamel coffee pots, picked up at French brocantes, make ideal containers. Around the garden, Kate and her team enjoy putting together little posies of spring flowers in hanging glass vases or even a tiny eggcup.
It is something they make time for, savouring each season’s bounty while it lasts.
Another area from which they regularly pick armfuls of cow parsley and red campion at this time of year is the wild-flower meadow beside the main drive. It is tended by Kate’s partner Sean Bird, who manages the wider estate with his assistant Gabor Kamondi. In recent years, blue lupins have been introduced here and the team regularly distribute their seed to encourage them to spread. Biodiversity is important to everyone at Woodhill and this is one of the many areas where wildlife can thrive.
Up at the top of the garden, on the sunny south-facing slope in front of the beautiful weather-boarded Gardeners’ Retreat, lie
“We have to keep moving seed trays and modules around to make space for more”
the cutting garden beds. These are one of the main areas where Kate and her team plant out their seedlings of cosmos, phlox, helichrysum and centaurea, scabious, calendula, rudbeckia and more, in mid to late May depending on the weather.
By mixing up the varieties and planting them all tightly together, they end up with an exuberant, natural-looking flowerbed where all the plants support each other and nothing needs staking. What started out as an experiment has proved highly successful and Woodhill’s owners love the ultra-pretty cottage-garden effect it creates.
When large enough to be transplanted, more seedlings need to go out in the herbaceous borders and coach house beds, and there are dahlias to plant and cuttings to take. Kate and her team must juggle all this with their ongoing maintenance tasks. Weeds, including an unfortunate outbreak of ground elder, grow as fast as the plants do, so hoeing and forking out these is a daily necessity. Edges are kept crisp with shears and a halfmoon edger, helping to ensure Woodhill always looks well-tended.
“It can be slightly overwhelming at times,” Kate says, “but we are such a happy team and we feel lucky to be working together like this in a beautiful place. We absolutely love it.”